What Story Does Your Data Tell?

You want to tell your company’s story. And if you’re in charge of defining KPIs and providing insight to executives to help keep your company profitable and competitive, there’s a good chance you’re dealing with large amounts of data day in and day out.

When it comes to keeping a pulse on an industry and its competition, businesses have more data at their fingertips than ever before.

Still, with all of this information at your disposal, you may not be digging deep enough to get the most out of it. In the world of financial data, the old adage “quality over quantity” certainly applies. But that is not to say you shouldn’t seek both from your financial data software platform.

If you’re looking to go deeper to uncover and highlight the information and insights that paint an accurate and informative picture of your business and its competition, you need to be asking a very important question: What story is my data telling?

Digging deeper positions you to capitalize on the information that matters most to its executive decision makers.

There’s more to the story

The fact is, there is data you may not even know you’re missing. If you’re using standardized databases like most businesses, there’s a good chance you’re missing key aspects of the data that will offer deep insights into your business.

The challenge of a lack of deep information is compounded by the tight deadlines financial directors face when preparing executive reports or quarterly SEC filings. When you’re knee-deep in crunch time you may be focused on quantity instead of quality, and in the process overlooking the data that really dials down to tell a more robust story about your business.

What other data is out there that you may not be getting to?

Commercial financial databases such as Bloomberg are limiting. While well established, these platforms are extremely standardized and not very user friendly. They don’t necessarily go out to collect all the information available, and you may have to read through 400 pages in order to get the information you need.

A dynamic, or discovery platform, meanwhile, can provide the complementary and unconventional data you need to round out your company’s story. Such a platform can give you access to footnotes and non-GAAP information including MD&A, earnings releases, and SEC comment letters for the companies you’re evaluating in your industry. Such data may not always be available in the more traditional financial databases. They can also significantly reduce the legwork and time associated with compiling data for reports.

As the name suggests, a discovery platform allows you to ask questions and discover new information about your business and its competitors along the way. When it comes to financial data, you don’t always know what you’re looking for. A discovery platform compensates for this by allowing you to ask questions and dig into any anomalies or trends you uncover along the way.

Quality discovery platforms also feature notifications, informing you if a company received a letter from the SEC, for example. That’s the kind of extremely valuable information you can use to keep your company ahead of the game.

And best of all, a dynamic platform will give you the confidence of knowing that once a report is complete, it will contain the most up-to-date industry financial information, even if the report originated weeks ago.

With a powerful and dynamic platform in place you can develop the story you want to tell about your business instead of that story being dictated by the data available.

This will enable you to:

Better communicate to the world and management about your company

Paint a clearer picture of how your company compares with others in your industry

Identify patterns and anomalies and drill into the details of what’s driving them

Stay ahead of trends in your business

Avoid receiving SEC comment letters and scrutiny

Make decisions preemptively based on information about other companies in your industry

This is the type of data that will help you tell an accurate and in-depth story about your company. And you can’t get it from a standard database.